Osric was stronger. He expected her to pull away, to dig in her heels, to claw at his hand and make herself easy to drag.
So she didn’t. Instead, she stepped closer.
He frowned, thrown off balance by obedience arriving late and wearing a suspicious little hat.
“Now,” he said, “that’s better.”
“That’s one interpretation.”
Amelia dropped her weight, twisted toward him, and drove the point of her elbow into the soft place below his ribs, exactly where Hob had once told her men disliked being reminded they possessed insides.
Osric grunted, and his grip loosened. She caught his wrist with both hands, pivoted as hard as her muddy feet would allow, and used every ounce of his forward motion against him. For one glorious, impossible second, Osric flew. Not far, but enough.
He hit the mud flat on his back with a wet, breathless sound that would’ve made Edith drop a pie, swear, and ask Amelia to do it again so she might enjoy it properly.
The red-faced man stared.
Amelia stared too, because honestly, the class had been six years ago in a fluorescent-lit gym next to a nail salon, and she’d been half convinced the instructor had let her win.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “It worked.”
Osric wheezed in the mud like a bellows with hurt feelings.
The red-faced man lunged. Amelia yanked the pottery shard from her sleeve and slashed at his hand. He cursed and jerked back, more startled than wounded, which was fine because startled was still better than grabbing.
She snatched the nearest thing she could find, a fallen apple branch half-buried in wet leaves, and swung with all the dignity of a woman batting a raccoon away from a garbage can.
The branch cracked against his shoulder and broke in half.
He looked at the sad stick left in her hand.
She looked at it too.
“Well,” she said, “that was disappointing.”
His face went ugly, and he came for her again.
Then hooves thundered through the orchard gap.
Galahad burst through the rain, grey hide dark with wet, white blaze sharp as lightning against the gloom. Thomas rode low in the saddle, sword already drawn, cloak streaming black behind him, his mail soaked beneath his surcoat and his face set in a fury so cold it seemed to burn the mist from the air. He looked larger than life and far too real, all scarred jaw, dark hairplastered to his brow, hard hands on the reins, and murder held in check by the thinnest thread of discipline.
Behind him came Hob, broad and grim on a bay horse with an axe in his hand, and two Ashcombe men whose shoulders carried the sort of intent that did not require translation in any century.
Thomas didn’t slow.
The red-faced man turned, perhaps deciding a hostage was safer than a fight.
Bad decision. Amelia lifted her half-branch again because apparently optimism had survived the day.
He grabbed for her. Then Thomas was there. He came off Galahad before the horse had fully stopped, boots hitting the mud with a hard splash, sword flashing in the rain. The red-faced man barely had time to raise his cudgel before Thomas struck it aside, drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, and sent him staggering back. A second blow turned the cudgel from threat into firewood. The third put the man face-first into the mud with the finality of a door being barred for the night.
Hob arrived laughing, which was somehow comforting and deeply alarming. He caught Osric by the back of his tunic just as the man tried to crawl away and planted one muddy boot between his shoulder blades.
“Going somewhere?”
Osric groaned.
“Didn’t think so.”
